The heart of St. Teresa’s Message
Jean Khoury
The meaning of her life
There is a fact in the life of St. Teresa of Ávila that remains central to understanding her, and it is reflected even in the choice of the Gospel for her feast day: Teresa loved water and, closely associated with it, the episode of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the fourth chapter of St John’s Gospel. For her, “water” represents God’s grace, the water of the Holy Spirit; in other words, “contemplation”, the most life-giving part of prayer, the “juicy” part of prayer.
This image of water tells us the entire story of St. Teresa. She discovered God’s grace, loved it, and understood that we can block its flow—a lesson for which she paid dearly during the first part of her life. Having learned the lesson, she spent hours describing how we receive this water, what it is like, and how we can come to receive it. She showed us the way.
Indeed, Way of Perfection (her pedagogical masterpiece) could well have carried the subtitle The Perfect Way to Receive the Divine Water in Abundance. This is precisely what Teresa herself failed to experience during almost the first twenty years of her religious life. One might have expected a person as committed, prayerful, spiritual and zealous as she was to have had this water flowing from the very first day. Yet this was not the case. Here lies the sorrowful aspect of her story, and the lesson God offers us through her life.
Observation
After so many years of reading, engaging with, teaching and writing about Teresa, of research, reflection, gaining perspective… I increasingly see (even if the substance remains more or less the same) that Teresa’s conversion, and what is truly at stake in her conversion, is absolutely central. She does not spend three years dragging her feet. She spends almost twenty years doing so! That is no small matter. If we measure the time that elapses before her conversion (20–39 years of age) and after her conversion, let us say, up to the writing of The Interior Castle, we have just under twenty years on the one hand, and just over twenty years on the other (39–62 years of age)!
If we look closely at Way of Perfection and try to understand its content, structure and internal dynamics, we will find that it reflects the problem that lay hidden beneath her lack of conversion. Before her conversion, she practised virtue, she was spiritual, she practised contemplative prayer for fifteen uninterrupted years, she had learnt recollection, she preached it (had others read about it), she gathered spiritual people together to talk about God and contemplative prayer, but the graces (the divine Water) were not flowing. Her consecration, her love of God, her love for the spiritual life and for prayer, were not sufficient for growth, transformation and the reception of sanctifying grace. In this respect, she reflects the Church of her time, which had already been longing for renewal for three centuries but had been unable to achieve it.
Once she understood the crucial point, the graces began to pour forth. Jesus had been waiting. For years, He had been waiting to pour out His graces. He was waiting for her to do something, to open the door. She thought she had opened it. In fact, it was closed. This is a major lesson. And she would spend the rest of her life explaining it and putting it into practice. In this way, she reforms the spiritual life within the Church. But she also reforms religious life: she offers the living heart of the reform of religious life.
What is astonishing is Jesus’ patience. He does not force things. He sends signals. But He cannot move forward or make things progress. Thinking generally about the Church, he even waited until the disaster of Luther’s undertaking. He did not stop him. The losses for the Church in terms of graces, growth and so on were enormous. Jesus waits three centuries for the Church. Jesus waits twenty years for Teresa! He is capable of waiting! This is something we do not understand! As long as we have not done what we must do, that is, played our part, nothing happens. And we content ourselves with this version of the faith, of the Gospel, of the Church. We think that it is all right, that this is how things are supposed to be.
Let us say it again: we are not dealing with a negligent person. This is not a matter of the first conversion. She is Christian, Catholic, a cradle Catholic, from a good family, religious, observant, spiritual and fervent. And despite all this, something is missing, and what is missing is so fundamental that the way is blocked for the torrents of grace to flow. There is a kind of necessity to cross the threshold from the visible to the invisible, to enter the heart. This is the modern age, in which the human soul opens up and must be explored. What takes place secretly, within the human heart, must be brought to light. It is like science moving from the level of visible things to what is invisible to the naked eye. I am trying to explain to a child the discovery of the atom and the composition of the atom. I have to use examples, because the atom is not visible to the naked eye. The stages in the discovery of the atom (1897, 1907, 1932) involve feeling one’s way forward. The stages in the discovery of the human soul, of the unconscious, also involve feeling one’s way forward. Teresa takes us into the world of the atom so to speak, into the subatomic world of the composition of the atom. She crosses the threshold that separates the visible from the invisible. She crosses the red line between the external forum and the internal forum (see below the note). The Lord gives her a magnifying glass with which to see. In other words, we move from the external stronghold, visible, tangible and quantifiable, to the internal stronghold, inward, hidden, invisible to others: the heart.
When we think about it, this is what Jesus does when He sets out His primary teaching, the teaching about the heart and the circumcision of the heart: the Sermon on the Mount. “You have heard that it was said of old”, “but I say to you”. A movement back and forth between the external law and the interior law.
The Gospel is always the same, right up to the present day. Theology, however, quantifies. The explanation of the faith that we offer also quantifies. It still operates within the external stronghold, quantifying, and does not seem willing to deploy the tools needed to explore the internal stronghold; it does not dare to enter the inner world. Theology acknowledges that this world exists. But it does not truly enter it. It remains at the level of the outer shell. Exegesis takes the place of the spiritual sense of the text, as though speaking about the spiritual were dangerous, vague or deviant. Of course, it is interior experience. But that, apparently, is not for theology. We should note that the most important dogmatic course in theology is missing: Pneumatology, the Holy Spirit. We should note that the course suffering the most is Spiritual Theology and its dependencies, particularly Spiritual Direction. We should also note in passing that the course which suffers, though without saying so too loudly, believing itself to be in good health, is Mariology. But once we open up the inner world, everything opens up. Christology, Redemption: how does it take place? What does Christ accomplish on the Cross? How does He save us?
Jesus crosses the barrier between the visible and the invisible. Indeed, this is His central, or essential, reproach to the Pharisees: you concern yourselves with what is external. The challenge He sets before us is a formidable one.
The great temptation for every Christian is to reduce the Gospel, to dilute its salt. To quantify. To ‘externalise’ it (to turn towards what is external). Yes, “— the body is important!” “— We are not angels”, and so on. The objections come thick and fast. And Christian life is reduced to charity, to service. “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me!” the Lord says. “— Yes, yes, but He is present in the poor!” Yes, of course!
Let us return to Teresa. Her lesson will escape us. We will remain focused on what she did externally, and on a fascinated spiritual reading of her writings, but we will not allow ourselves to be grasped by the heart of her message, which is bound up with her conversion. We will end up imitating the spiritual life she pursued for almost twenty years without making progress. And we will wonder why religious life no longer flourishes today especially in the western world.
I think there is no worse deaf person than one who does not want to hear. Such a person will wait three centuries, or another twenty years! By then, it will be too late, and the damage will be very difficult to bear. Meanwhile, the Lord has His arms full of graces, and no one understands why He cannot manage to give them to us!
Understanding Jesus
If she was zealous, fervent and committed, how come Jesus was not giving her his water? Let us go deeper and learn from St. Teresa the secret of Jesus: how he works and what he expects from us.
The explanation of her conversion, what was at stake, why her spiritual life was blocked for so many years, and the interior dynamism of her Reform are all laid before us in her book Way of Perfection. Notice its starting point. Her daughters, gathered in small numbers in the first reformed monastery (St. Joseph, Avila), ask her to tell them about contemplation, i.e. the graces we are supposed to receive when we pray. They wanted the “juicy bits”. Fair enough. One can have a pure reason for asking for them, because they transform us, sanctify us, make us grow and make us love God more. They are needed. The grace of God is not optional. God wants to give us his grace (not the feeling of his grace!), to each one of us, all the time and abundantly. So, what is the secret we need to know in order to start receiving these graces? She did everything she had to do for twenty years. She was spiritual, committed, zealous, obedient, a “good nun”, but never received the abundance of graces God wants to give us. Why? In her book, Teresa, explain to us why it did not work. How can we make it work?
Instead of diving immediately into describing the reception of the graces (forms of prayer and contemplation), she spends almost half of her book, Way of Perfection, explaining the difference between having a spiritual commitment and having a perfectly spiritual commitment. The difference is between what is spiritual (we think this is enough, good enough) and what is perfectly spiritual. This is the reason why the book bears the word perfection in its title. She does not let us imagine what perfection is, what our mind and imagination might imagine “perfection” to be. She goes deeper. She enters into the subtle movements of the heart, movements that only God can see! They are difficult to see from the external forum*, difficult to spot in confession, not always easy for the mistress of novices to spot (even if St. Therese did spot them), rather neglected in our examination of conscience, and not often mentioned in the ordinary teaching of the Church. This is really the core of her teaching, the centre of her mission in the Church as a Doctor of the Church.
*Note on the external forum and the internal forum. The external forum refers to the public, observable dimension of a person’s life, including their actions, conduct, responsibilities and relationships insofar as these can be assessed externally. The internal forum refers to the person’s interior life, particularly the movements of conscience, intentions, desires, attachments and personal relationship with God. In the Church, the distinction also has a specific canonical meaning: the external forum concerns matters that can be established and addressed in the Church’s public governance, whereas the internal forum concerns the person’s interior conscience and relationship with God, including matters addressed in spiritual direction and, in a distinct and confidential way, in sacramental confession. These two forums must not be confused, although they are not unrelated. A person’s external conduct may be entirely correct while the interior disposition from which it proceeds still requires purification and conversion. Conversely, an interior struggle cannot always be adequately understood or assessed from external conduct alone. Teresa’s teaching is particularly important in this respect: she directs our attention beyond the observable practice of virtue to the hidden movements of the heart, where the quality of our response to God’s grace is revealed. It is in this interior domain that we must examine not only what we do, but how and why we do it, what we love, what we cling to and whether we are giving ourselves to Jesus without reservation.
St. Teresa is not a Doctor because first she teaches prayer. Many taught it before her, and she learnt it from them! She read about prayer in the works of Francisco de Osuna, a Franciscan. Remember that the movement of the Recollects (Los Recogidos), i.e. people who practise contemplative prayer and explain it, began in Spain at the end of the previous century – many decades before St. Teresa’s reform, some Franciscans monasteries were practising three hours of daily contemplative prayer. She was born into a fervent Catholic Spain, where prayer was very much one of the main subjects. Many orders had undergone a reform, a spiritual reform, long before hers.
Note: No one can deny that she is an unparalleled master of contemplative prayer and that contemplative prayer is an essential part of her message. Nevertheless, we must be careful not to lose sight of the paradox this article seeks to emphasise.
As shocking as it can seem, her mission is not, first and foremost, to teach us prayer. Her method itself is very flexible, suitable for many, unlike the Ignatian one. If you read her carefully, you will notice that she does not impose a rigid form. She opts for presence, consideration (who is God, in whose presence am I right now?), recollection, conversation, friendship with Jesus: she offers not one but different forms of approach (to the point that some say that there is no systematic “method” as such). Even though she clearly states that Jesus is at the centre of our being, and that this completely changed her prayer life because she no longer had to overstretch her imagination, travelling to the Holy Land to find Jesus, her method, if we can even use the word method, is flexible, because it is based on freely enacting a relationship. Love does not need instructions; we find them spontaneously. Her way is not first about thinking, imagining, but loving, giving oneself, keeping true company to Jesus.
The heart of her message and teaching lies in her book Way of Perfection. It is at the heart of prayer, at the heart of Christian life, at the heart of religious life, the trigger of all graces. Throughout her book, she tells us that Jesus’ secret is, in fact, the secret of love: he wants to give himself to you, but in order to receive him and be received by him, you need to give yourself totally and unconditionally to him. Everything depends on the quality of the gift of yourself. He takes what you give him, and if you give him a little, he takes it, but he can only give himself accordingly: a little.
The golden rule of spiritual life (it cost her twenty years of her life to learn it), the golden rule for reforming our spiritual life, the golden means of receiving abundant graces, is to give oneself totally to him, everyday, throughout the day. She knows from experience that we are slow to give ourselves; she has her own bitter experience. We are full of fears, worries and emotions, and full of ourselves! These are tremendous obstacles to the gift of ourselves, to true love.
Here is the heart of her message. The equation, so to speak, is simple: you give yourself and, as a consequence, he gives himself (he gives his graces, i.e. contemplation). In other words, Jesus, who is standing at the door of our heart and knocking, yearning to enter into us and pour his graces into us, waits for us to open the door. “Opening the door” depends on us. The handle of the door is on our side, not his! A big discovery, is it not? Opening the door depends on us. He always gives us the general preparatory grace we need to use to open it. How do we open it? By giving ourselves. We give ourselves totally, we commit ourselves totally, we come out of ourselves, forget about ourselves for the sake of his love, the door opens and he comes in immediately. We open it only a little, and he can only come inside a little. We leave the door ajar, and he waits. He can wait twenty years! Bitter experience. Ignorance! The subtleties of our heart. But also the truth of our heart and the truth of God, the truth about Jesus’ behaviour!
This is the mystery: God is God, God is the Creator, the one who holds the universe in his hands and sustains it in being and life. This God, who possesses everything, does not possess our heart! Worse still, he respects our choice, our free will, to the point that this respect can block our relationship for twenty years! The Church had three centuries of desire for reform before St. Teresa of Ávila. It even reached a breaking point that triggered the Protestant Reformation, which, in fact, is not a reformation, as it did not reform but deviated and diminished faith. Teresa remains in the Church and reforms it from within. And this is the lesson she learnt bitterly! Jesus wants to give his graces abundantly to all of us but he respects our freewill and waits.
So the entire first part of her book, her guidebook for reform, is dedicated not to virtues and their practice – many taught this before her. No. Not at all. She was practising these virtues! For twenty years! What was lacking was the quality of that practice, the “giving it all”. This is what was lacking. It was the way we practise virtue that was lacking. It wasn’t what she calls “perfect”.
The first half of the book is not about the practice of virtue! It is much more precise than that. It is about focusing on the immense difference between being spiritual (i.e. practising virtues) and practising virtues perfectly, i.e. with the perfect gift, commitment and surrender of ourselves to Jesus, retaining nothing for ourselves. There is a radical (yes, radical) difference between practising a spiritual virtue (say, loving our neighbour) and practising it with the perfection Jesus expects. The determination, the “determined determination”, that Teresa speaks about is the determination involved in the gift of oneself, i.e. the quality of the gift (complete? Determined? Unconditional?) to Jesus.
We can walk (practise) in the spiritual life in a nonchalant way, almost as though taking a pleasant walk on the beach or through a lovely field or forest. This way of walking does not involve the full gift of oneself, the purity of heart, the total commitment, dedicating all our energy to him and coming out of ourselves. Quality here is radically important.
Again and again, she received regularly the sacraments, she was spiritual, committed to religious life, zealous, i.e. gathering people to talk about God and spread contemplative prayer. She even wanted to reform her order. But none of the above triggered the graces Jesus wanted to give her, just as he wants to give them to each one of us. Why? Her heart was not totally given to him, and to him alone. She enjoyed conversations about God and the spiritual life, and the friendship of the people she gathered! “Nothing wrong with all of that,” all of us would say (no priest spotted it in confession!). Indeed, she thought she was doing fine! Her heart was not totally given to Jesus. She kept some of her human emotions and affections to herself, using them in her own way. Jesus wanted everything!
If we give ourselves to him royally, as an immediate result, he gives himself to us royally (He communicates his graces (= contemplation))! And when we say that Jesus gives himself to us royally, we mean royally! i.e. abundantly, in such a way that he quenches our thirst for Love. Remember that these were Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman: whoever drinks from the Water he gives will not thirst again! But to drink from his water, Teresa had to answer the same question Jesus asked the Samaritan woman: where is your heart? Where are your attachments? Your emotional attachments? Jesus, of course, did not put it in these terms. He simply said, very succinctly but radically: “Go, find your husband and come back.” It is by entering into our heart that we can see the real attachments of our emotions and desires (the “husband”!). It is by examining our heart and the way we love that we can “find our husband”… This will open our heart to its real destiny: Jesus is the Bridegroom! He needs all my heart, unconditionally, repeating everyday the gift of myself, throughout the day.
But, in reality, am I giving him all my heart. Is all my heart given to Jesus? Am I keeping some part of it to myself? Jesus respects this and will not move… for twenty years! A hard lesson, but the truth! Do we love the truth? The truth of Love? True love?
Human Cooperation: Giving Ourselves to Jesus
We now need to understand more precisely what this human cooperation means. If Jesus wants to give us his graces abundantly, if he is waiting at the door of our heart, and if opening the door depends on us, what exactly are we supposed to do? How do we cooperate with his grace? How does his grace work? What does it mean to give ourselves totally to him?
First of all, let us be clear: we do not produce grace. We do not earn it. We do not oblige Jesus to give himself to us by making greater efforts. God always takes the initiative. He loves us first. He comes towards us, calls us, awakens our desire for him and gives us always the grace we need to respond, it is called “the General Help of the grace of God”*. Even our desire to give ourselves to him is already touched by his grace. We must never forget this. Otherwise, we would turn the spiritual life into an achievement of our own, as though we could reach God by our own strength. No! Everything begins with God, everything depends on his grace, and everything is directed towards receiving his gift. But when we speak about grace, we need to distinguish two types of grace. The General one, and the Particular one. The General one, is understood as prepartory grace (see Thomas Aquinas). It is always given to us (like the blood in the body) and we need to use it (like activating the muscle) to correspond to God’s call or initiative (God’s extended hand) and if we don’t use it, nothing will happen.
This means that we have something to do, leaning on this grace that is always given to us (we don’t need to ask for it). The Lord says: ask and you will receive. To ask, we use the general prepartory grace. What we will receive is the personal and direct intervention of the Holy Spirit. God has created us with freedom, and he takes our freedom seriously. He does not force us to love him. He does not impose himself upon us. He wants us to respond, to consent, to open our hearts and welcome him. This is where our cooperation becomes essential. We cannot replace God’s action, but neither can God make our free response in our place. He constantly gives us the grace to respond, and we must actually use it to respond and if we do not use this grace, nothing will happen. This is the mystery of our relationship with him. Even if we are prisoners of a sin, we can always ask for God’s help: “God help me, free me, give me your healing,…”. We don’t say to ourselves: “I don’t have the grace to ask”. We just ask. Why? Because he constantly gives us the general help of his grace.
*See General and Particular Help of the Grace of God in St. Teresa (fundamental)
So, what does this response involve? It means giving ourselves to Jesus, not merely in words, not merely through our religious practices, not merely through our commitment to prayer or our desire to become holy, but in the concrete reality of our lives. It means allowing him to become the centre of our existence, the one to whom we give our heart, our desires, our affections, our decisions and our future. It means no longer reserving a part of ourselves, as though there were areas of our lives in which we wished to remain in control, deciding for ourselves how we would love, whom we would love and where we would place our affections.
This is precisely where the difficulty lies. We can sincerely love Jesus and yet remain attached to ourselves. We can practise virtue and still practise it in a way that leaves us in possession of ourselves. We can pray, serve others, live a religious life, gather people to speak about God and even desire to reform the Church, while still keeping something of our heart for ourselves. We do not necessarily see this. We may even be convinced that we have given everything. Teresa herself thought so. This is why we need to enter into the interior world, to examine our heart and discover what is really happening within us. The question is not simply whether we are doing good things, but how we are doing them, what moves us, where our heart rests and whether we are truly allowing Jesus to become everything for us.
Human cooperation, therefore, is not simply a matter of doing more. It is a matter of giving ourselves more completely. We do not necessarily need more activities, more prayers, more commitments or more external demonstrations of zeal. We need to discover the quality of our response to Jesus. Are we practising virtue because we have decided to follow him, while still keeping our own preferences and attachments intact? Or are we practising virtue as an expression of our total gift of ourselves to him? There is a radical difference between the two. The external action may be identical, but the interior disposition can be very different.
Here is what St. Teresa says about the perfection of the practice: “But, unfortunate that we are, rare are those who must achieve it! However, the one who guards against offending God and has entered into religious life believes he has done everything. Oh! how many worms have gone unnoticed, like the one that gnawed at Jonah’s ivy (Jn. 4:6-7)! They have gnawed away at our virtues through self-love, personal esteem, our judgments of others, even through small things, our lack of charity towards others because we fail to love them as ourselves; for if we manage, slowly, to fulfil our obligations so as not to commit a sin, we are still far from total union with God’s will.” (Fifth Mansions, III,6)
We have also a striking example given by Blessed Marie Eugène OCD in his book: “I am a Daughter of the Church”: “Such a person walks carrying out his duty, calmly, without apparent fervour or cowardice; his actions are good but weak. Another, his neighbour, is barely distinguished outwardly, but her awakened fervour sustains a diligent fidelity to purify her intention and to add to her actions that little something which ensures perfection: her actions are good and intense. This last one, and she alone, practices in love. The years pass in a communal life that unites and differentiates them outwardly only slightly. However, the second has attained union of will, while the first, perhaps more gifted, has fallen asleep in an ease and routine that have halted all progress.” (“I am a Daughter of the Church” p. 183)
Read also: The Two Systems of Christian Life
Take, for example, the love of our neighbour. We can love our neighbour sincerely, perform acts of charity and fulfil our duties, yet still remain attached to the satisfaction we derive from doing so, to the affection we receive in return or to the image we have of ourselves as good and generous people. None of this necessarily makes our actions worthless. But it shows us how much our hearts need to be purified and transformed. Jesus wants us to love, but he also wants to transform the way we love. He wants our charity to become an expression of his own love in us, rather than remaining simply a good human action that we perform with our own resources and for our own satisfaction. The same applies to prayer, obedience, service and every other spiritual practice.
This is why we must not confuse human cooperation with human effort alone. We can make tremendous efforts and still remain centred on ourselves. We can be zealous and yet not surrender. We can be generous in certain areas of our lives and still protect others from God’s action. The real question is whether we are consenting to his work in us, even when it touches the things to which we are most attached. Sometimes this consent requires a decisive act of the will; sometimes it requires a long process of purification in which we gradually discover and surrender what we had not even realised we were holding back. In both cases, grace remains at work. We are not asked to transform ourselves independently of God, but to cooperate with the transformation he is bringing about.
We must also understand that this surrender does not mean despising our humanity, suppressing every natural affection or pretending that we no longer have emotions and desires. God created our humanity, and he wants to redeem and transform it. The problem is not that we love people, enjoy friendships or experience legitimate human affections. The problem arises when these become attachments that we refuse to surrender to God’s will, or when we use them in ways that prevent us from loving him and others as we should. Giving ourselves to Jesus means allowing him to order our loves, purify our affections and teach us how to love. It means that nothing in our lives should be placed beyond his reach.
And here we return to the mystery of grace. Jesus wants to act in us, he wants to give us his grace, on a daily basis (“give us this day our daily bread”). Jesus wants to give himself to us. By loving our neighbour as he wants us to love him, we trigger his grace. See what St. John of the Cross says about it: “Here it must be noted that God places his grace and love in the soul only according to the soul’s will and love. Therefore, the good lover must strive to ensure that this is never lacking, since by this means, as we have said, he will stir God to love him more — if one may speak in this way — and to delight in his soul. And to continue in this charity, it is necessary to practise and exercise what the Apostle says: ‘Charity is patient, it is kind, without envy, without malice, without pride, without ambition; it does not seek what is in its own interest, it is not provoked, it thinks no evil, it does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; it endures everything that must be endured, it believes everything that must be believed, it hopes for everything, it bears everything that is fitting for charity’ (1 Cor. 13:4–7).” (SCA 12,11) He says also: “Therefore, it is a matter of great importance for the soul to exercise acts of love in this life, so that, becoming perfect in a short time, it may not remain for long, here below or above, without seeing God.” (LF I,6,34) Quoted by St Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
John 14:21: “He who loves me will be loved by my Father.” He who loves the Body of Christ (his neighbour) will be loved by my Father, that is to say, God will give himself to him. He will receive divine joy; he will receive God within himself! The more a stretch of river gives downstream (at a lower level), the more God gives himself upstream (from above).
It is urgent to practise love, the love of Christ. This prompts God to give himself to us! We ask God to give us his Spirit so that we may love his Body! And, as a consequence, God gives himself to us even more! It becomes a snowball effect! In this way, we come to “prompt” God to love us more.
This is what St. Teresa of Avila will explain using the example of the chess game, checkmating Jesus, i.e. triggering his grace. See Way of Perfection, Ms of Escorial, 25,1-4. Very important. For the checkmate move see also here.
If on one hand God remains free in the way he gives himself, he is deeply and divinely yearning to give himself. Yet we can place obstacles in the way of his transforming action by resisting his grace, refusing to respond to his invitations or clinging to things that he is asking us to surrender. Our cooperation does not create his generosity; it is our free response to the generosity that is already being offered to us.
This also means that we must be patient with ourselves and with others. We cannot simply look at someone who has not experienced a particular grace and conclude that the person has refused to give himself or herself to God. We do not know the interior work of grace in another person’s soul, nor can we measure the relationship between God’s action and a person’s response from the outside. Teresa’s lesson is not a formula for judging others. It is an invitation to examine our own hearts, to stop being satisfied with the external appearance of our spiritual lives and to ask Jesus to show us what still needs to be surrendered.
The great discovery is that our freedom matters enormously because our relationship with Jesus is a relationship of love. He does not want merely our activities, our virtues or our religious observance. He wants us ourselves. He wants our heart, and he wants it freely. He gives us the grace to make this gift, accompanies us as we learn to make it and continues to transform us through our cooperation. The more we learn to consent to his action, the more our entire life can become an expression of our belonging to him.
This is the lesson Teresa learnt through her own bitter experience. We can spend years living a sincere and committed spiritual life without yet understanding what it means to give ourselves to Jesus without reservation. We can be close to the things of God and yet remain unaware of the deeper attachments of our hearts. But once we begin to understand, the whole spiritual life takes on a new meaning. Prayer is no longer simply something we practise; it becomes the place where we learn to belong to Jesus. Virtue is no longer simply something we acquire; it becomes the expression of a heart being transformed by his grace. Religious life is no longer simply a way of living; it becomes the concrete form of our total gift of ourselves to him.
So let us return to the question that lies at the heart of Teresa’s story. Jesus wants to give us his grace. He has already come towards us, and he continues to call us. He does not wait because he is reluctant to love us, but he respects the freedom through which we must respond to his love. What, then, are we still holding back? Where are our hearts attached? What are we unwilling to surrender? And are we prepared to let Jesus show us the truth?
These are not questions we can answer once and for all by making a grand declaration. They belong to the daily reality of the spiritual life. Every day, in our prayer, in our relationships, in our decisions and in the practice of virtue, we are invited to respond to the grace we receive. Every day, we can learn to give ourselves more completely. And every day, we can ask Jesus to do in us what we cannot do by ourselves.
The grace comes from him. Our response, made possible and sustained by that grace, must become truly ours. This is the mystery of human cooperation. And this is the lesson Teresa offers us: not that we must earn the water, but that we must learn to receive it; not that we must make Jesus love us, but that we must allow his love to transform us; not that we must achieve holiness by our own efforts, but that we must give ourselves to the One who alone can make us holy.
15 October 2026
Addendum
Question: “For Holy Mother, was the struggle between prayer and socialising in the parlour a part of her Dark Night, or only the precursor? The Poem itself says, ‘my house being now all stilled’, indicating that all disordered sensual attachments are detached. If that is so, the precursor to the Dark Night could be a very, very long period if it means that all our appetites and desires need to be severed. For Holy Mother, this lasted 19 years. This is important for the Formators to understand, because they may think they are already in the Dark Night (and, from my experience as a Formator, many do), whereas in reality they could still be in the struggling/purifying stage before the Dark Night of the Sense.”
Answer: Two of the main challenges when we read Holy Mother and Holy Father are these.
First, we need to understand, on a practical level, that is, from the point of view of experience, what each of them is talking about. We need to understand his or her language, his or her coined expressions, and what they mean for us on a practical level, in our personal experience and journey, so that we can benefit from their advice and grow spiritually. This is the goal: to grow in love, to be transformed, to do what God is waiting for us to do, so that He can work in us more and better, and so that we can better correspond to His grace.
Second, we need to understand and “see” how, in fact, they can be talking about the same realities, but from their own angle, experience, doctrine and perspective. In fact, each one has his or her own way of expressing things: language, concepts, coined expressions, focus, etc. Yet they still describe the same things, the same realities, the same action of God in us, that is, what we go through.
I think a good way to start would be to describe different experiences that are easy for us to identify and then see what our Holy Parents say about them. But before that, I would like to clarify some points.
One important experience that they both know well and saw around them, but for which they do not use the expression we would use today, is the second conversion. This is key. It is also key for us to agree on what it is, from the point of view of experience, and where to find it in their writings. I would identify Holy Mother’s conversion as the “second conversion”. “Second” because she is already Catholic and consecrated. The first conversion is to become Christian/Catholic, to convert from atheism, another religion, etc.
We find her description/account of her second conversion in her Autobiography, before and after the section dedicated to the four ways of watering the garden. What is at stake in her second conversion? Is it purification? A purification? A stage in the purification? To be honest, I would not put it this way. What was lacking was the total gift of herself to Christ. This is the real trigger for the reception of all the graces. Her heart was divided. She did not want to listen to Jesus, who warned her. And she did not want to listen to a nun in the monastery who warned her. Also, no priest, whether confessor or spiritual director, was able to “see” the problem.
In fact, it is not first a need for purification. I would not put it this way. I would rather use her own expressions: she was not giving all her heart to Jesus; she was not giving Him all her emotions and desires; she was not putting all her “pleasure” in Jesus. It is about being determined in the total gift of oneself. It is something that depends on us, not on God, since He constantly gives us His grace.
She was not determined to give her whole being to Jesus. She chose to keep part of her heart or emotions for something else. It was an attachment; in the name of Christ, she was satisfying/pleasing herself. It was difficult for this to be seen by a spiritual director because it is hidden in the heart, in the emotions, in the internal forum.
I personally would assume that, with regard to the external forum, she was totally obedient. The laws back then were loose. They allowed these meetings. She did not commit a visible sin, visible in the external forum. Maybe there was a little excess in the amount of time spent in these encounters. But that was allowed back then, as it is allowed in many non-Carmelite monasteries today, simply because the style of life is not that strict.
The entire book of Way of Perfection illustrates this precise issue and also explains the meaning of her Reform. In fact, what was lacking in her life was not the practice of contemplative prayer. She had practised it for 15 solid years prior to her second conversion. What was lacking was the exact core of her conversion: her heart was not given totally, “to perfection”, to the Lord.
God was not absent. Jesus was not absent. His grace was not absent. But He was not able to work in her life; He was not able to give Himself to her and shower her with all His graces.
In fact, once she understood that she was keeping some part of her heart to herself, once she decided to give herself totally to the Lord, and once she decided to work heroically on the virtues, she started to receive an abundance of graces. All that we know about her is the Teresa who emerged after her conversion. All the abundant graces she received were liberated by her second conversion! Her total commitment allowed the Lord to give Himself.
Let us always remember that the Lord is constantly at the door of our heart and knocks. If we hear His knocking and understand it, and if we open the door of our heart, that is, if we decide to give ourselves totally to Him, and if we renew this total gift of ourselves to Him, then He enters and dines with us, giving us His abundant graces. And this will generate steady spiritual growth.
This is why she repeats this fundamental golden rule of the spiritual life: the more you give yourself, the more the Lord gives Himself. And vice versa. Paradoxically, Jesus’ grace depends on us.
When the sisters gathered at the newly reformed monastery of St Joseph ask her to talk about the graces they are supposed to receive, that is, contemplation, she structures her book, Way of Perfection, in a way that shows how to receive contemplation. In fact, she spends the entire first half, so to speak, of her book explaining the conditions for the reception of the graces: practising the virtues to perfection, not just being spiritual and practising them spiritually. No, to perfection. She explains the difference between walking in a nonchalant way, as it comes, lukewarm, and the perfection of the practice of the virtues.
For me, if this is not understood, the key to the reformed life is not understood, spiritual life is not understood, Jesus Himself is not understood, and the workings of the Holy Spirit are not understood.
We are not talking here about all the coined expressions of St John of the Cross: night, contemplation, passive, active, sense, spirit. But we perfectly understand what is at stake: the quality of the gift of ourselves, renewed every day.
Remember what St. Thérèse read at the beginning of her Carmelite life: “it is of utmost importance to practise love” (to make acts of love, love of the neighbour). Is it not the core virtue of the three virtues?! Is not this virtue alone re-explained in the Fifth Mansion to show us what will realise our first step of major transformation? Purification of the sense achieved, the rational part in us now commands the sensual part: it is the union of the will.
All the effort towards this perfection is called by St John of the Cross the active purification of the sense. The grace to finally overcome the sensual part and have the rational part command, offering us a stable life, is called “passive purification” or the “passive night” of the sense.
When does the second conversion occur? When moving from the Third to the Fourth Mansions. Union of will is the result/fruit of the practice of perfection, that is, the active night of the sense. This is when the “supernatural things start” (read the Fourth Mansions, first chapter, the very beginning).
It is important to understand that contemplation starts already from this moment. It is not perfect contemplation yet; it is not a pure one; it is one with a human modality. But it is still supernatural. It is only much later that we will see the first drops of pure contemplation. We will be moving from contemplation in a human modality to pure contemplation.
Can we agree on these elements?
Often, as a result of her new style of life and her fervour, a novice will quite rapidly notice changes in her prayer. The tastes, the “consolation”, during contemplative prayer will diminish. She will have to practise the virtues in a determined and perfect way. This is what will make her grow spiritually! The Lord leans on this effort and on its quality.
The first victory is the “house” of sensuality, which is now all stilled. The upper half of our being, the rational part, has now received the grace of having an “empire” over the sensual part, having control over it, possessing herself, being regular, not leaning on “consolation”, and having a rather arid, calm prayer.
We are not yet near the deeper purification. This is a first victory.
St John of the Cross seems to place the second conversion before the two purifications: the purification of the sense and the purification of the spirit. It is visible in the structure of the Spiritual Canticle: it starts with the wound of love, the second conversion. Then we have the purification of the sense, the lower level of contemplation, and then the purification of the spirit, purer contemplation.
I hope you can see, from an experiential point of view, all the elements of our spiritual life, the meaning of Way of Perfection, and the stages of growth.
United in Prayer
in Mary
Jean